loosening my bonds, blows upon me.
Embrace my beautiful breasts
with the fragrance of the wild jasmine
upon your radiant chest.
Give me the nectar of your mouth,
and with your jeweled lotus hands.
adorn my lowly head.The poet’s identifying himself as a “gopi,” one of the many cowherd girls who
is in love with Kr.s.n.a, is a motif that we find in literature all over India. Although
this is one of the earlier examples, in time, the love of the gopis, especially that
of Ra ̄dha ̄, the girlfriend and consort of Kr.s.n.a, is seen as exemplary. Some poets
approach Kr.s.n.a and speak as though they were the cowherd girl (Hardy,
Hawley); others, in later centuries speak in the voices of Ra ̄dha ̄’s girlfriends. Men
and women poets adopt the voices of girls speaking directly to Vis.n.u or Kr.s.n.a;
though as Hawley has shown, at least in the north Indian sixteenth-century
literature, there isa discernible difference in the voice of the woman poet Mı ̄ra ̄
and the voice of the male poet Sur who adopts a woman’s voice (Hawley 1986).
The human being addressing the deity as a male lover is pronounced in some
of the performing arts in the Hindu culture, especially classical dance. One has
to note three elements in this scenario: first, that the intensity of the passion
articulated in the song – whether it is distress or wrath at the lover not coming
- is palpable and it is not simplyorjusta metaphor for or an allegorical descrip-
tion of the separation (viraha) between the human soul and the Supreme Being.
To explain it away as only spiritual separation is to take away from the integrity
of the poet’s experience and his/her stark emotion. One cannot interpret away
the intensity of the poet’s bodily longing as an allegory; one cannot speak simply
in terms of the soul’s quest for god. That is to lose sight of the drama of the poet’s
longing and love. Second, the devotional theme and the spiritual longing are also
integral themes undergirding or sometimes overt in the songs and dances; we
cannot by any measure think of these songs as justromantic fictions or conceits.
Finally, one cannot simply speak about the “lover” poems (“na ̄yaki bha ̄va,” “mode
of the heroine”) and songs as a monolithic genre. There are many varieties
of such “lover” poems with different portrayals of women; different notions of
“femininities.” It is this last point that I will be nuancing, to show that one
cannot automatically stereotype the woman’s voice as the helpless, pining lover.
One of the many ways in which the separation between God and the human
being is portrayed is by speaking of the agony that prevails when one is sepa-
rated from one’s beloved. Frequently, one is suspicious of one’s lover; a suspicion
that transforms itself into wrath or distress. In many songs that are choreo-
graphed and performed in the Bha ̄rata Natyam style, Vis.n.u, S ́iva, or Murgan
̄
, all
revered Gods in the Hindu tradition, are seen as the absent or errant male. While,
in general, the mood in the early Tamil poems (as in the Tiruva ̄ymoli) we see
more verses where a poet speaks in a distressed, “pining” tone than in an angry
one, this is by no means the only sentiment expressed in the “woman’s” voice.
gender in a devotional universe 573